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Purpose: In the current work, we provide a portrait of heavy alcohol use, cigarette smoking, mental health, and suicide ideation by sexual orientation among a large sample of US adults aged 25 years and older.

Design/methodology/approach: We produce a repository of information on sexual orientation, substance use, mental well-being, and suicide ideation for adults aged 25 years and older using Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) surveys for nine US states from 2011 to 2018. We establish baseline differences on these outcomes for gay, lesbian, and bisexual (GLB), relative to heterosexual, adults and then use regression techniques to adjust the estimates for important sociodemographic, socioeconomic, and relationship status variables.

Findings: Disparities by sexual orientation across substance use, mental health, and suicide ideation are concerning, some alarmingly so. Bisexuals, particularly women, face pronounced challenges across outcomes. Sexual minority men and women report significantly more poor mental health days and much higher odds of suicide ideation. To illustrate, gay men, lesbians, and bisexual men and women, relative to their heterosexual counterparts, have odds of seriously contemplating taking their own lives that are two to four times higher even after adjusting for relevant controls.

Originality/value: Existing knowledge connecting GLB identity and mental well-being has focused largely on adolescent and young adults. We provide a representative study on older adult differences across four different behavioral health outcomes by sexual orientation. The scale of the disparities we report here, and their implications for overall well-being across groups, deserves national attention and action.

To investigate ethnic group differences in the utilization of preventive medical care services among U.S. Asian and Latino immigrant adults.

Using data from the 2002–2003 National Latino and Asian American Study, we examined whether differences exist in the reporting of any preventive physical care or dental/optician visit during the last year across Asian and Latino immigrant groups. Following, we applied Andersen’s (1995) Behavioral Model of Health Services Use to assess how ethnic disparities in preventive care use are a function of predisposing, enabling/impeding, and need-based factors.

Descriptive results showed that among Latinos, a much lower proportion of Mexican immigrants reported a preventive medical care visit during the last year than either Cuban or Puerto Rican immigrants. Asian immigrants show less variation in use, but significant differences still exist with Filipino immigrants reporting the highest level of use, followed by Vietnamese and then Chinese immigrants. Logistic regression models also indicated that predisposing characteristics, especially aspects of acculturation status, contribute strongly to ethnic group differences in preventive care use, while enabling/disabling and need-based characteristics are less important.

While studies of medical care use often treat Asians and Latinos as homogeneous groups, our findings illustrate the need for a more detailed view of the foreign-born population. Findings also highlight the role of acculturation status in shaping group differences in preventive medical care use – and as such, the importance of considering these differences when promoting the use of timely preventive care services among immigrant populations.

This chapter looks at what it means to set out to do anthropological research with tangata whenua (New Zealanders of Māori descent; literally, ‘people of the land’), from the particular perspective of a Pākehā (New Zealander of non-Māori descent – usually European) musical anthropologist with an interest in sound-made worlds. In late 2017, Lowe was awarded funding for a conjoint PhD scholarship in anthropology at James Cook University, Australia, and Aarhus University, Denmark. However, following advice from several colleagues in Aotearoa New Zealand, Lowe decided to assess the viability of the project with his prospective Māori and non-Māori collaborators prior to officially starting his PhD candidature. Throughout this process of pre-ethics (Barrett, 2016), Lowe met with both Māori and non-Māori to discuss the proposed PhD project; a ‘listening in’ to his own socio-historical positioning as a Pākehā anthropologist within contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. This approach to anthropological research is in response to George (2017), who argues for a new politically and ethnically aware mode of anthropology that aims to (re)establish relationships of true meaning between anthropology and Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand.